-M2 and M5 missile effects extremely weedy, nowhere near as impressive as the old ones (granted, my old ones had SM&M++ making them look even cooler)
-The different effects on the M2 and M5 explosions tend to separate, making a lop-sided and odd-looking explosion. I think the dull orange cloud is moving forward slightly, while the bright orange effect is staying put.
(In general I really don't like the new M-series effects...I'm reverting to the old ones for SM&M++ until the second of those two issues gets fixed and I can try making good in-engine effects for them. I think Luminous is better at large explosions than the game engine)

-Hiteffect for large particle-beam hits is a little underwhelming, and spends too much time onscreen.

-New plasma effect is nice, but feels very difficult to work with as a modder.

-Generally speaking I like the smaller procedural hiteffects. Larger ones not quite so much.

-Kinetic rounds in general a little too big. I liked the old size more personally, but they'd be fine if they didn't look like you're firing hornet-sized projectiles at people.

-Positron effects are really, really boring. They look like the plasma launcher/cannon on the chimera ships. A procedural effect that looks a bit more like the older effects would let this damage type look fairly unique and interesting. Right now it's......mostly unique, except against chimeric plasma weapons, but really dull.

-Lasers are cool though. The automatic colour-detection for muzzle effects should probably look at the colours of the beam effect, rather than using damage calculations though. It makes modding new laser colors more annoying.

-Flares from kinetic weapon fireeffects are too large and can be uncomfortable to look at (plus I question the wisdom of putting a bunch of flashing lights on screen all the time. Dunno what the risk to epileptics is, but it's something to think about). Generally, the fireeffect of a weapon should never be as large as its hit effect, and it should never be larger unless there's a really good reason for it.

And from a perspective of a modder.....the new effects, mostly the particle system ones, are hard to mod.The old system is more flexible for most purposes, more intuitive, better documented, bugs out less, doesn't refuse to render as much, doesn't render as white-only graphics as much....and granted, this is mostly me being unfamiliar with a new and somewhat undocumented system.....but there's another issue: it's a lot easier to find the effects in the first place. Having to open a whole bunch of XML files to find each individual procedural effect is....troublesome. Then trying to swap from a procedural system to a hard-coded one without having a template to work from.....it's another barrier to less experienced modders, and one that I've been increasingly concerned with. It also means that you (still) can't really override weapon effects without completely overriding the weapon itself. And if you're making a new weapon from scratch....there's nothing you can copy and play with in XML. It's mostly procedural code using tlisp. So you have to work out what lines should be there in order to make new effects. I don't think there's a solution to this.....but it's something that needs to be considered when splitting effects like this. We need more templates and examples in the source code of how effects work without the scripting that the game uses as a shortcut to get around individually coding effects.

I also like the new effects overall, but think they're excessive in some ways. In particular (no pun intended):

- Many fire and hit effects are distractingly bright.

- Blast and especially thermo hit effects are way too big. Shots that only hit a single target shouldn't obscure entire ships and make them look like area effect weapons.

- Standard projectile effects are too long. Even at the low end many of them are longer than most ships. And we can see ships pass harmlessly through the tail of the projectile often. That's OK when it's a solid object with a trail, but strange when it's a beam. Effectively, only the first 48 pixels of a lightspeed beam are damaging. I agree some effects can be longer than that for visibility, but they shouldn't be anywhere close to 5 times that long, which some of them currently are.

- Kinetic projectiles' lengths scale very differently from other damage types. The length depends on the speed, which makes high speed, medium damage shots like the Flenser look similar to low speed, high damage shots like the AK505. Also, the ratio between the maximum and minimum lengths is only 2, whereas for most types it seems to be around 3 2/3.

Positron is full of tear drops. (I made custom positron effects for my weapons because I dislike the standard.)

I agree that M2/M5 effects are underwhelming. They are too small. The big clouds seems to be the hitEffects that appear on the targets struck, and not part of the explosion. The explosion itself appears to be a solid shrinking orange orb.

One more thing. Many thermo explosions, especially from shockwaves, can easily slow down the game. I retired one of my superweapons because it slowed the game too much in 1.7 alpha, but not in 1.6.

Download and Play in 1.8 Beta...Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
Download and Play in 1.7...Star Castle Arcade: Relive classic arcade gaming in a new Transcendence adventure!Playership Drones v8: Under construction!

-M2 and M5 missile effects extremely weedy, nowhere near as impressive as the old ones

Have to agree on that one - the old vanilla m3 and m5 animations really did hammer in that 'endgame launcher' feeling in. They could use some extra effect on top of them to replicate that feel. The explosion size is fine, and might get distracting if it's made any bigger.

-Positron effects are really, really boring. They look like the plasma launcher/cannon on the chimera ships. A procedural effect that looks a bit more like the older effects would let this damage type look fairly unique and interesting. Right now it's......mostly unique, except against chimeric plasma weapons, but really dull.

I've only seen the APC, which looks about as impressive as it ought to given the nerf. I'd give it a bit of a buff to make it worth using again(maybe not back to where it was) if I were giving it an effect as distinctive as the previous one.

-Lasers are cool though. The automatic colour-detection for muzzle effects should probably look at the colours of the beam effect, rather than using damage calculations though. It makes modding new laser colors more annoying.

My only gripe is the ZG24 cluster mag effect, which looks a lot worse now than it did.

Beyond that I haven't run into many issues.

Project Renegade (Beta) : "The Poor Man's Corporate Command!"
"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. " -Julius Caesar as written by William Shakespeare, a notorious permadeath player.

Yes, I miss the old flame star ZG24. It was prettier than the new brown shard explosion.

Download and Play in 1.8 Beta...Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
Download and Play in 1.7...Star Castle Arcade: Relive classic arcade gaming in a new Transcendence adventure!Playership Drones v8: Under construction!